Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development, Dream Games — a developer of mobile puzzle games — has raised $155 million in funding, a Series B that values the startup at $1 […]
Monthly Archives: June 2021
Noname Security closes $60M Series B to eliminate API flaws
Enterprise API security startup Noname Security has raised a $60 million Series B funding round, just six months after closing $25 million at Series A. The round was led by Insight Partners with Next47, Forgepoint, and The Syndicate Group (TSG) also participating, and brings Noname’s total funding to $85 million since emerging from stealth in […]
Shogun, a front end e-commerce page builder, nabs $67.5M as retailers look for alternatives to marketplaces
E-commerce marketplaces continue to play a major role in how consumers buy goods online and how retailers show off and sell goods to those consumers, accounting globally for 47% of all e-commerce sales. But today, one of the startups that has built technology to help retailers build and run more direct relationships — by way […]
Apple and Snap partner JigSpace, the ‘Canva for 3D,’ raises a $4.7M Series A
When former Art Director Zac Duff started teaching a game development course online in 2015, he faced the same challenges that teachers around the globe have become all too familiar with after a pandemic-induced lockdown. So, he used his experience in 3D design to build a virtual reality classroom to make remote learning more engaging […]
The great chip crisis threatens the promise of Moore’s Law
Even as microchips have become essential in so many products, their development and manufacturing have come to be dominated by a small number of producers with limited capacity—and appetite—for churning out the commodity chips that are a staple for today’s technologies. And because making chips requires hundreds of manufacturing steps and months of production time, […]
Tech’s new labor movement is harnessing lessons learned a century ago
The rise of the tech worker Even in the early 1990s, when Lerner went to war with Apple as an organizer of the Justice for Janitors campaign and won union rights for subcontracted cleaning workers across the tech sector, the question of “Who is a tech worker?” loomed large. Through those successful campaigns, Lerner helped […]
What does breaking up Big Tech really mean?
This past fall, the Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general filed suit against Facebook, charging it with illegally maintaining a monopoly over the social-networking space “through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.” Soon after, the US Department of Justice and 11 state attorneys general filed suit against Google, charging it with illegally maintaining […]
Cheaper solar PV is key to addressing climate change
While Google nailed the switch from R&D to deployment, it arguably still bet big on scaling up the wrong technology. In the early 2010s, the solar race looked like a tight competition between solar photovoltaic (PV) and utility-scale concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses sun-heated fluids to drive power turbines. Google quickly invested more than […]
China’s path to modernization has, for centuries, gone through my hometown
In 1957, Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, a fellow Chinese graduate of the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize for proposing that when some elementary particles decay, they do so in a way that distinguishes left from right. They were the first Chinese laureates. Speaking at the Nobel banquet, Yang noted that the prize had […]
The power of us
And yet in this unprecedented environment incredible stories of hope and empowerment have emerged. We see people finding ways to respond to suffering and injustice with positive change. Take the stories Abby Ohlheiser has collected, including those of Carlisa Johnson, who turned a Google Doc into a nexus of power for the Black Lives Matter […]